Wishing You a Wilson Pickett New Year

Eventually, we were going to get to the dude on our banner – Wilson Pickett, one of this blog’s favorite singers of all-time. While we like Motown, Stax and Muscle Shoals soul has always been a more visceral experience, and Pickett is one of the few artists to feature prominently in the lore of both. While Pickett wasn’t a Stax talent (he was signed to Atlantic records), he recorded at the Stax studios in the early part of his career with their now legendary studio band – an amalgamation of what would become to be known as Booker T and the MG’s and also the Mar-Keys, and eventually would gain fame as the Blues Brothers Band from the Belushi film, featuring famed backing musicians Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, and even, at times, a young Isaac Hayes.

Atlantic President Jerry Wexler, who had recently signed Pickett his label, sent the young singer, still seeking a hit, to Memphis to record with the band that had recently backed the riotously successful Otis Redding. The first song they recorded, written by Pickett and Steve Cropper, was to be Pickett’s most enduring song: “‘Til the Midnight Hour”. Here’s the man himself belting out a live, sweaty rendition:

The song has been recorded in fairly straightforward fashion by an array of artists – Tina Turner, Roxy Music, and Van Morrison, among them. Moreover, it’s been a very popular song for bands to play live on New Year’s Eve, ignoring the blatant sexual overtones of the song, and just concentrating on the title (Roxy Music’s, linked above was at a New Year’s Eve television special. Bruce Springsteen sand the song at his New Year’s concert in the ’70′s:

And the favorite band of friend-of-blog Jamie Mac, and blog-namesake of Just Covers, routinely played the song at their New Year’s show at the drop of the ball:

In one of our two favorite renditions, the tune was turned into a Reggae hit by legendary producer Lee “Scratch” Perry and his house band, the Silvertones:

In the late seventies and early eighties, a number of punk bands arose that looked back not just at earlier punk acts, but reggae and dub (The Clash), R&B (too many to name), and the Mods (essentially just a rocked-up R&B style in of itself) for influence. With the release of the Who’s (the original mods) film Quadrophenia in 1979, the Mod Revival sparked, and at the forefront was Paul Weller (dubbed “The Modfather”), and his band, The Jam. While Scratch Perry and the Silvertones slowed the song down and brought it nearly to a ballad, the Jam sped the song up, condensed it into less than two minutes, and even found room for a harmonica solo.

In the mid-eighties, however, is when our favorite cover of the tune was recorded. Johnny Thunders, guitarist and occasional frontman of the New York Dolls, an American, cross-dressing, punk band that put the Rolling Stones, the MC5, and 1960′s Girl-group pop in a blender and recorded the results. After the Dolls, Thunders tried, and failed, to form acts with an all-star cast of punk legends – Television Bassist Richard Hell, MC5 frontman Wayne Kramer, and Sid Vicious among them. After a slew of solo albums, Thunders, before his premature death, recorded Copy Cats, an album of his influences, including Pickett’s “‘Til the Midnight Hour”. Here’s Thunders performing the tune at the Roxy, a few years before the release of his cover album. In his hands, the guitar riff almost takes on a resemblence to the MC5′s “Kick Out the Jams”:

Have a Happy New Year, from the Midnight Hour on.

The Mutual Appreciation Society

At Lollapalooza 2009, it was really fucking hot. Like, 100+ degrees, no wind. All conceivable spots of shade were claimed by heaving, half-clothed sweating bodies – people were so desperate for respite that the ice-cream booth line were unrealistically long, and even the Frozen Fage yogurt booth sported a 30 minute wait.  Lou Reed was putting the crowd through a twenty minute soundcheck, while verbally berating the sound techs. Insufferable heat, waiting for a Lou Reed performance – this is hell, right? Almost on cue, the crowd, over-heated, tired, maybe a little drunk, and in no mood for Lou Reed began a “Fuck Lou Reed” chant. The natives were restless.

Not to be perturbed, Reed, clearly a sadist, played anyway to a raucous, booing crowd. He didn’t win them over.

The day hung on a knife’s edge – would we survive the heat? Should we stay? Would Lou Reed make it out alive? Suddenly, a lilting guitar cut through my thought process – Band of Horses started on the alternate state. We stumbled over, fleeing the over-cooked anger of the Lou Reed scene. The sun began to set behind the building on South Michigan Avenue, and a breeze blew in off of Lake Michigan. The stage was bathed in blue lighting that even looked like it was cooling. For the first time all day, my wife and I sat down. “No One’s Gonna Love You” started playing, and we decided that we’d stick it out a little longer.

A near-perfect moment like that – a moment that delivered everything you could possibly want at a given time – is a rare thing, and one that certainly can shape your perception almost forever. Though admittedly a bit bland and plenty maudlin, Band Of Horses jumped from “a band on my iPod that I rarely listen to” to one of my favorites almost solely on the strength of that perfect moment.

Oddly, the song was covered recently by the amazing Cee-Lo Green on his new album:

Aside from the drastically altered instrumental arrangement (Cee-Lo takes it from a rock song to a string-soaked R&B tune), this song just feel stronger, doesn’t it? In BOH’s Ben Bridwell’s hands, it has the sound of a guy, still in love, trying and failing to be the bigger man. There’s still plenty of sadness, insecurity (I never want to hear you say you’re better off), but it has the feel of a guy who know’s what he’s supposed to be saying, but doesn’t have his heart behind it. On Green’s, the almost triumphant chorus lends the song a whole different vibe. Green sounds like a man of conviction – like the strength of his love is a point of pride, not sadness.

As the site tagline notes “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, and this isn’t any one-way-covering relationship. In 2009, Bridwell, a Georgia Bulldog fan, watched his favorite team go down to LSU in a flurry of horrendous excessive celebration flags, and wanted to write a song about his favorite team. Bridwell got his hands on Cee-Lo’s retro tribute to his home, entitled “Georgia”:

There isn’t really a different vibe here – Cee-Lo’s tale of his community becoming a surrogate parent in the stead of his absent father is still intact. The Band of Horses, to complete the motivation for recording the song, excise much of Cee-Lo’s backing instrumentation and record with the University of Georgia Redcoat Marching band. It’s a tribute to both artists, really, that both versions of the song sound about thirty to forty years older than they are, albeit from different genres of music – Cee-Lo’s strutting with a walking bass line, and BOH’s ripped from Blue-Eyed Soul:

Name Those Tunes

Briefly, we’re going to return to the late Harry Nilsson for likely (possibly?) the last time in Just Covers history, for a brief contest. The prize? Your own sense of smug satisfaction in being an absurd music fan.

In 1964, the Beatles, previously known largely for puppy-love songs, released John Lennon’s “You Can’t Do That” as a B-Side to the brashly idealistic “Can’t Buy Me Love”, juxtaposing the A-Side’s gleeful narrator who has no use for anything that isn’t love with the first instance of Lennon’s jealous side, one that he’d revisit numerous times throughout his career. Lennon’s paranoid, jealous narrator warns his lover repeatedly that if he learns that she’s talking to any other guys, he’s “gonna leave her flat”. With as little romance as possible, Lennon is more concerned with other’s perception than the girl herself (Everybody’s green/Cause I’m the one, who won your love/But if it’s seen/You’re talking that way/They’d laugh in my face). The song is also notable for being the first appearance of George Harrison’s 12-string Rickenbacker – the second ever produced.

Nilsson covered not only the song, but large swaths of the Beatles’ catalog to-date three years later, weaving snippets of lyrics and musical signatures from other Beatles’ songs into his song – prompting both Lennon and McCartney to dub Nilsson as their favorite American songwriter. The result, frankly, is a bit jarring – some of the lyrical references seem sudden and out-of-place, while others blend seamlessly into the background.

Here’s a live clip of the Beatles playing the song. As an aside, you’ll note  the camera oddly breaks away from Lennon as he plays the solo. In an interview with Jann Wenner (you should read all of it, really) Lennon’s self-consciousness about his guitar-playing is evident – he even asked not to be filmed, in case he made a technical mistake. As a result, he quips “They called George the invisible singer, well I’m the invisible guitarist”.

And, finally – Nilsson’s:

According to Wikipedia, Nilsson weaves references to at least 20 Beatles songs into his three-and-a-half minute track. How many can you find? Let us know in the comments.

The Lost Weekend

http://new.music.yahoo.com/walkmen/tracks/dont-forget-me–36519280 

Cover songs can take a listener to some pretty strange places. Lately at Justcovers, we’ve been wearing out “Pussy Cats” by the Walkmen – a note-for-note, song-for-song reproduction of Harry Nilsson’s album of the same name – a production the Walkmen rattled off in a handful of days as a send-off to their private studio which they closed after making the record. Nilsson’s record, itself, is more than half covers – Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers To Cross”, Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, Ben E. King’s “Save the Last Dance For Me”, Johnny Thunder’s “Loop De Loop”, and “Rock Around the Clock”. So yeah, they were covering cover songs. Weird? Sure.

Pussy Cats was recorded by Nilsson and produced by John Lennon as the two cut a swath of mayhem through Los Angeles – getting kicked out of the Troubador Club for heckling the Smothers Brothers, and trashing Lou Adler’s (Adler is this guy, you know, the one that sits next to Jack at Lakers games) spare bedroom, culiminating in Nilsson throwing furniture out a thirty foot window. The album name is a winking retort to the pair’s reputation as wild boys, but didn’t live anything down – the album sounds like it was recorded in the middle of a party (clinking glasses and conversational voices are heard throughout in the background), and Nilsson pressed on despite suffering a ruptured vocal chord. The album cover features children’s playblocks with a “D” and an “S” on either side of a rug – “drugs”. Ha. Maybe having Keith Moon around to play congas doesn’t help perception?

Most these songs are re-purposed as party tunes – Nilsson shrieks “Many Rivers”, and is joined by a boisterous drunken chorus on “Subterreanean Homesick Blues”, “Rock Around the Clock”, and “Loop De Loop”. The madness really only recedes on one of his original songs – the wry, haunting, and funny “Don’t Forget Me”.

The song sticks out like a sore thumb on the record, but makes sense given the history. Lennon was on his “Lost Weekend” – his time away from Yoko Ono in which she arranged an affair for him with their publicist. Seriously. Nilsson, meanwhile, was in the midst of his second divorce – the two, basically, were having chick problems. “Don’t Forget Me” is a smirking and melancholy song about love lasting through drug use, divorce, death, and even through the end of time (“nothing lasts forever – but I will always love you”).

Beyond the Walkmen’s note-for-note cover, a few more exist, and all are largely consistent with the original song. The New Pornographers’ Neko Case recorded a version that features a number of piano’s playing simultaneously, giving the song a layered sound that the frail original lacks.

In our opinion, the piano and the almost bland vocals make the song sound too professional – the late-night desperation has been replaced by a carefully arranged accompaniment and slick production values. This isn’t what self-destruction is supposed to sound like.

Joe Cocker, as to be expected, certainly brought the self-destruction aspect to the song, and his whiskey-soaked vocals would seem to be a perfect match with the general vibe of the song. Cocker, however, can’t resist making the song “rock and roll”, adding standard rock and roll fills to the song, and speeding it up to a canter from it’s standard depressed trudge. In the process, somehow, Nilsson actually ends up sounding drunker and more down on his luck than Joe Cocker.

Macy Gray covered the song for the “Confessions of a Shopaholic” soundtrack which is about as bad as that sounds, Marianne Faithful covered it in similarly unspeakable fashion.

In the end, the best cover of one of the few originals on Pussy Cats is that of the Walkmen – which sounds almost precisely the same as Nilsson’s – complete with clinking stemware in the background (faithful to the album, at least) and Hamilton Leithauser’s uncanny vocal resemblence to Nilsson. Possibly, the mood is right because the Walkmen were bidding goodbye to their first studio – a place of their own creation.

So what did we learn? “Don’t Forget Me” is a great, but deeply personal song, and while anyone can cover the music, they can’t cover the biography of Nilsson and Lennon, and where the two were in their lives when they wrote and produced the song. Nilsson’s song brings genuine audible anguish – something that’s hard to copy when you’re not the orginal narrator. It’s one thing to cover a song about sexual stamina (Train Kept A’Rollin’), but maybe an intensely personal, biographical song is best left to the original practitioner, or at least some folks who are going through some shit of their own.

Where You Goin’ With That Gun in Your Hand

 

Mexican culture has the “corrido” – essentially song standards that seem to have appeared from out of the ether with no discernible origin or composer – just a piece of music handed down from person to person. Most of these take the form of myths – either about famous criminals or famous heroes. Today, one of the most popular forms is the “narcorrido”, or drug ballad. Narcorridos, more often than not, are true crime stories – depicting an actual murder, drug deal, extortion, or some other unsavory act. Nearly all corridos and narcorridos end with a moral – a lesson learned (although in narcorridos, it may not be a lesson we’d want to be learned). As an example, a narcorrido recently appeared on the show “Breaking Bad” re-telling “true” events that occurred during the show up to that point.

The song “Hey Joe”, really, isn’t that different. Tim Rose, one of the artists we’ll deal with in a minute, claimed the authorship of the song as “traditional” – while not strictly true, this isn’t strictly wrong, either. The song’s first copyright came in 1962, from coffee-house entertainer Billy Roberts. In actuality, however, “Hey Joe” is likely one of many songs that steals its subject matter from a song made nearly ten years earlier – “Little Sadie”, which also is about a spouse-killer on the run, and based on true events (other versions of the same event were recorded by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash).

Hendrix’s iconic version can obviously be heard in Roberts’ – Roberts’ strummed acoustic chord progression would provide the groundwork for Hendrix’s. Roberts’ original, however is a mournful, dour song, complete with a moaning backing choir and Roberts’ croaked and muttered vocals, and some slide guitar ad-libbing on top of the acoustic for the duration of the song.

A few years later, California garage-rock band The Leaves recorded a number of versions of the song (so did a band called Love, but the versions are remarkably similar, and we like the one by the Leaves more), finally settling on a version propelled by a fuzztone guitar.

This is the first instance of what we’ll call the “frantic” version of Hey Joe (which is how Led Zeppelin, among many others would play the song). The Leaves have dragged the song out of its country/folk roots with the amped up pace and the (unfortunately) somewhat stock guitar solos. Further, they actually add the literal conversational “call and response” that the song suggests – Joe, and person watching him run.

According to David Crosby, he begged and pleaded with his fellow Byrds to play this song as early as 1964 – two years before both Love and The Leaves recorded it. His bandmates were apathetic, but finally swayed when they saw multiple popular versions released.

The Byrd’s version is quite similar to that of the Leaves, albeit, in our opinion a better performance. Their inspiration, however, was apparently the band Love as they kept the same lyrical confusion (“Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that money in your hand?”). There’s no great innovation here – just a stronger vocal performance from David Crosby, a bit more virtuosity on guitar from Roger McGuinn, and a crunchier bass.

The next step forward for the song was from serial plagiarist Tim Rose. Rose’s version, while sonically distinct from Roberts’, is of the same spirit – dark, brooding, angry. Unlike Roberts’, and completely unlike the various “frantic” versions littering the airways, Roberts’ version is drastically slowed down, and significantly more spare – just a man and his guitar. If there is a blatant precursor to Hendrix’s version, it’s here – the pace is nearly identical, his use of the choir is the same, even the vocal vamping is word-for-word. So what makes Rose’s undeniably rad take somewhat less rad?

Rose, as noted above, claimed the song as “traditional” (claiming copyrighted music as “traditional” is something Rose would do repeatedly), trying to absolve himself from paying royalties to Roberts, who held the copyright on the song. Rose rationalized this by claiming that he heard “some guy” sing the song when he was a kid. Despite the rabid interest of folk and blues historians alike, there’s no evidence to support the assertion that this song existed before Roberts (a former musical partner of Roberts claimed to co-write the song with him roughly 7 years prior to Roberts’ release – this is plausible, but still doesn’t come close to corroborating Rose’s story). Rose, on his website, still claims the song as “traditional” – a lone voice in the wilderness. Unfortunate, as on its own merit, Rose’s version is possibly our favorite.

Finally, as it’s JCB’s policy to always include a Nick Cave version when one exists, here is Nick Cave singing Hey Joe, backed by jazz legends Joe Haden, Hiram Bullock, and Toots Thielmans:

So, yeah. We still have the chord progression, as drastically rearranged as this is. Obviously, there is a palpable sense of menace (duh, it’s Nick Cave) – not dissimilar from Roberts and Rose. But other than that? Cave went avant-jazz weirdo on the song, although it contains some great playing from a legendary group of musicians.

Hey Joe, not unlike the much more covered Stagger Lee, is, to coin a Nick Cave album title, a Murder Ballad – not dissimilar from the Mexican tradition of the narcorrido, complete with a moral - a tale of a man’s revenge, and how he’s probably worse off for taking it.

When Motorhead Covers Early ’50′s Swing, or, A Good Song Is a Good Song

The term “cover band” is hardly a positive one when it comes to music. It’s that crappy duo strumming out Dave Mathews songs to over-served girls at the college bar, attempting to shut out the guy yelling “PLAY FREEBIRD!” at the top of his lungs. At the height of the art-form – something like Hell’s Belles, it’s still no better than novelty, or camp. Even more successful bands pepper their shows with lifeless covers of Rolling Stones songs, and the like. Feh.

But this is a bad rap. At their best, and done well, covers can show the advancement of music – of what seminal artists listened to and what influenced them, as well of being a clear example of how that music inspired THEM to sound, in turn. At Just Covers, we’re going to delve into that influence – on why certain bands played the songs of others, and how it put a stamp on their own sound. We’ll be doing this by, obviously, explicitly discussing cover songs themselves, but also tracing how certain forms of music have, over the years, bled into others.

The song “Train Kept A’Rollin” has been popular, in some form, for 60 years – surviving the coming of R&B, country, blues, mods, garage rock, and heavy metal. In 1951, Tiny Bradshaw put the original version on vinyl – Bradshaw, the leader of his own swing/jazz orchestra performed it as a swinging call-and-response number, complete with a backing horn section and a SAX solo.

As Bradshaw, based in New York, performed the song in the early ’50′s, it fell on the ears of Memphis-transplant Johnny Burnette, who moved to the city in 1951. Five years later, Burnette (and his Rock n’ Roll trio!), Rockabilly pioneers, put the song into overdrive, replete with a distorted electric guitar – thought by many to be the first recorded instance of distortion (incidentally, see where fellow Memphis-born Elvis may have gotten part of his style from?).

The Trio’s version, interestingly, was released as single whose B-side was a song called “Honey Hush”. Check out the guitar riff on Honey Hush – remember it for future use:

That riff sounds pretty familiar, right? Can’t quite place it? Check out the Yardbirds playing Train in 1966:

Hear the bouncing, low-register guitar riff? That’s right – the Yardbirds took Burnette’s sped-up version that, over the verses was mostly just vocals and drums, and dropped Burnette’s riff from Honey Hush down under it – turning it into the most METAL song four dudes wearing velvet blazers could conceivably play (interestingly, in the late ’70′s, Foghat would cover Honey Hush - a move that led many (ignorant) fans to accuse plagiarism of the Yardbird’s ”Train”).  Notably, this is when the song first actually started to bear a similarity to its namesake - the pummeling, propulsive beat, the droning vocals, the “train whistle” guitar squeal at the top of the song. Train Kept A’Rollin was starting to sound like a train.

The Yardbirds original lineup, with Jeff Beck on guitar, adapted their version of the song. Eventually, the band would hire Jimmy Page as their bassist, and then use him to join, and eventually replace Beck when Beck departed for a solo career. When vocalist Keith Relf and the rest of the lineup tired of touring, they left Page with the Yardbird’s name, and a slate of unfulfilled tour dates. Page assembled what would become Led Zeppelin, and took them on tour, playing the Yardbird’s catalog – premiering in their first show with “Train Kept A’Rollin’”. The song became a live Led Zeppelin staple – employed frequently as their show-closing encore. Here’s Zeppelin drowning out Robert Plant live in 1969:

Virtually all of the Beck innovations remain: the marriage of the two Burnette songs, the harmonica solo, the heaviness, the train whistle. Not surprisingly, given Zeppelin’s trademark time shifts, there are some percussive change-ups here. At around 1:30, we can hear the instruments drop away as John Bonham pounds out a beat that sounds, literally, like a steam train charging down the tracks.

Aerosmith, five years later, recorded the most recognizable version of the song. Never has the power of an excellent song been more clear – perpetual GARBIDGEMEN such as Aerosmith take their try at the song – and it’s still good. As each previous version got faster and faster, Aerosmith slowed down the pace – their version starts, stops, lulls, and drives. The riff, while disjointed, remains here. The Yardbirds’ harmonica and whistles, Zeppelin’s percussive innovations are also still intact. However, while the Yardbirds and Zeppelin played the song in overdrive, as nascent heavy metal, Aersosmith, for lack of a better term, played the song with a groove, as a blues-rock song.

And yeah, as promised, in the late ’70′s, Motorhead played the Yardbird’s version, sans the harmonica, plus Lemmy vocals:

So what do we have? A swing orchestra song, sent into over-drive by a Rockabilly pioneer, who inspired a band of mods to marry the song with its B-side single, refined by a group of Rock Gods,  somehow brought back to blues by a hard-rock band from Boston, and lovingly restored by a Heavy Metal icon and music historian. Throughout it all, the song is recognizable as itself regardless of performer and genre.

Train Kept A’Rollin’ has been a potted plant in the history of modern popular music – it’s remained in the corner of the room as the flooring, paint, carpeting, and furniture have changed with the times. All the while, “Train” has remained – adapting to its new surroundings. It’s proof of our central tenet: a good song is a good song.